How to make global load balancing work for you

YOUR COMPANY IS GROWING

Today, more than ever, companies are seeing the benefits of co-location in more than one city. A business can be closer to its customers, while also having improved disaster recovery when a single city goes down. While the idea is simple, the implementation is not always so straight forward. It can also be very costly in both man-hours and income.

THE PROBLEMS:

• HARDWARE
  How do you manage access to all of your separate city build outs? One way is to invest in expensive licenses and closed-box hardware to direct traffic for you. Another way is to build your own BGP network with expensive networking hardware and high management costs.
  
  
• FAILOVER
  Can your business seamlessly fail over from one damaged node? Does your gear take into account different metrics, like a slow webserver. If you have increased traffic to one machine, can you easily spread that traffic out to the rest of your network in a timely fashion, avoiding an overloaded server?
  
  
• MANAGEMENT
  How easy is it to make a change to your system? In an emergency, can a less-technical person be trusted to understand your management interface, and make changes to keep you on-line?

THE SOLUTION: GLOBAL LOAD BALANCING

GLOBAL LOAD BALANCING has the power to direct traffic between your nodes based on the criteria you provide. Working through DNS, setup is easy to understand. Traffic is handled on a hostname basis, for example, you can balance www.yoursite.com between multiple servers the following ways, alone or in unison.

1. GEOGRAPHIC BALANCING
   You can distribute traffic between ips based on the geographic location of the requestor. Send all your west coast traffic to your west coast servers, all of your east coast traffic to your east coast servers.
   
   
2. WEIGHTED ROUND-ROBIN
   You have some brand new hardware inside one of your cities? Let GLOBAL LOAD BALANCING send requestors to it more often. Use old servers to take a small percentage of the load. Add as many servers as you want for redundancy. WEIGHTED ROUND-ROBIN gives you control over where your traffic gets directed, and will work in conjunction with GEOGRAPHIC BALANCING.
   
   
3. PORT CHECKS
   GLOBAL LOAD BALANCING will check the status of your machines, and gracefully remove machines from your GLOBAL DNS pool if they fail your tests. You can check your servers by PING, TCP to a specific port, or even SNMP polls based on a MIB you provide.
   
   
4. EASY MANAGEMENT
   Our unified online portal, named Mercury, will allow you and your business to manage your GLOBAL LOAD BALANCING service from where ever you may find yourself. Use the same login you use for your SUPERDNS and RAPIDEDGE CACHE management.

Call your PEER 1 account manager today at 1.866.683.7747 for more information.